Underground
547 Words
POV: Marco
---
I drove for an hour. Maybe two. I lost count of the turns, the tunnels, the back roads that didn't appear on any map. Sasha didn't ask where we were going. She just watched the darkness pass and held on.
Finally, I pulled into an underground garage. Concrete walls. Flickering lights. The smell of oil and old secrets.
"Where are we?" she asked.
"A place Antonio's father built. For emergencies."
"You've been here before?"
"Once. When I was seventeen. Fresh off the streets, half dead, full of rage." I killed the engine. "Vincent brought me here. Told me this was where I'd hide if the world came for me."
"Is the world coming for us?"
I looked at her. "It already is."
---
The bunker was smaller than I remembered. Two rooms – a bedroom, a living area – and a kitchenette stocked with canned goods and bottled water. No windows. No phone. Just a radio that connected to one frequency.
Antonio's voice crackled through an hour after we arrived.
"You're alive."
"Barely."
"The safe house is gone. No survivors. They knew exactly where to hit."
"Someone talked."
"Ivan." Antonio's voice was grim. "He's been feeding Dmitri information for weeks. We're tracking him now."
"Track faster."
"Marco—"
"He almost killed her. He almost killed us. I want him found."
Silence. Then: "I'll handle Ivan. You keep her alive."
The radio went dead.
Sasha stood in the doorway, arms crossed.
"He's not going to stop," she said. "Ivan. He won't stop until I'm dead or he is."
"Then we make sure it's him."
"You don't understand. He's not like Dmitri. He's not rational. He's obsessed. With me. With our father. With the idea that I betrayed everything we were supposed to be."
"Then he's a fool."
She almost smiled. "Most obsessed people are."
I crossed to her, took her face in my hands.
"I'm not going to let him hurt you."
"You can't promise that."
"I can promise I'll die trying."
She kissed me then – not soft, not grateful. Something else. Something that felt like goodbye.
I kissed her back and pretended not to notice.
---
The hours blurred.
We ate. We slept. We waited.
She told me more about her childhood – the training, the missions, the cold emptiness of being raised as a weapon. I told her about my parents, my sister, the guilt I'd carried for eighteen years.
Two broken people, hiding in a bunker, waiting for the world to end.
"This isn't how I imagined falling in love," she said.
"How did you imagine it?"
"Different. Safer. Less explosions."
I laughed – actually laughed – and she smiled.
"Same," I said. "But I wouldn't change it."
"Even now?"
"Even now."
She leaned her head on my shoulder.
"What happens when we get out of here?" she asked.
"We finish this. We take down Dmitri. We find Ivan. And then—"
"And then?"
I looked at the ceiling, at the concrete walls, at the small, temporary world we'd built.
"And then we figure out how to be normal."
"Think we can?"
"I have no idea."
She laughed this time.
"Honesty," she said. "I like that."
"Stick around. You might get more."
She kissed my cheek.
"I plan to."
- Writer
